Following the social network's 500 million user milestone which they hit last week, we've created a dashboard showing various relationships between countries present on Facebook, the number of users and the percentage of the population that hold an account.

Industry: social networking

For who: anyone!

Data Source(s): Google Spreadsheet from The Guardian data blog

Viewing tip: Make the dashboard fullscreen by clicking the "Fullscreen" button in the bottom left hand corner of the dashboard.

The dashboard contains 3 visualizations which all show different relationships.

The first, the treemap, shows the number of users in July 2010 in relation to the percentage penetration (number of people on Facebook as a percentage of the country's population). The size of each individual box within the treemap shows the total number of Facebook users in the country. The strength of the color shows the percentage penetration, with the darkest blue being attributed to a higher percentage of users, and the lightest blue being attributed to the lowest. As you can see from the visualization, the USA has more than 3 times the number of users as any other country in the data, but not the highest number of people on Facebook as a percentage of the country's population. As it is difficult to distinguish different shades of blue when the data is so close, you can hover over the points to get more detailed information. By doing this we can quickly see that Hong Kong has the highest concentration of users with regards to its population. Another (perhaps easier) way of finding this out is by simply altering the filters for the data which can be found underneath the attributes box on the right hand side.

The second visualization is the geovisualization, or heat map. We have chosen graduated circles to display the information but you can change it back to the original heatmap format by clicking on "Rendering Mode" in the bottom left hand corner. Here we see the relationship between the population and the percentage penetration. The size of the graduated circles show proportionately the population size, and the number inside demonstrates the percentage penetration. A very simple but a highly visual representation, the heatmap is probably the best way to get an overall geographical idea of where Facebook's users are around the world.

Lastly, our third chart is the classic pie chart. It is better to use this type of chart when there is not too much data (pie charts work best with smaller data sets because after a certain point the data becomes impossible to read) so we have used the filters to filter out any country with a population of less than 10 million. This gives us a nice overview of the relationship between the percentage penetration and the number of users. We have also chosen to display the percentage penetration measure by size, to make it really clear which countries have a high percentage (USA, UK) and which have a low percentage (India, Mexico). Bime automatically chooses different colors for each segment which make the chart aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.

Don't forget to make each visualization fullscreen when you look at it, by clicking the little box in the top right hand corner of each chart, so you can really see the details of your data set. Alternatively you can view all three together fullscreen by clicking "Fullscreen" in the bottom left hand corner of the dashboard. If you want to export a PDF or an image of your visualization, Bime makes it super easy to do this - no more messing around with printscreen - simply click the "Export PDF" or "Export Image" buttons at the bottom of the dashboard (N.B. heatmaps cannot be exported). Equally you might choose to export your data to an Excel spreadsheet.